A Visual History of *The Wolfman’*s Oscar-Nominated Makeup

For the 2010 remake of The Wolfman, filmmakers had to decide how closely to match the 1941 film. This concept art, by makeup artist Rick Baker, shows the final decision. Photograph courtesy NBC Universal.

In other sketches, such as the one above, Rick Baker imitated the 1941 film more closely.Â Photograph courtesy NBC Universal.

After a three-hour makeup application, Benicio Del Toro has no trouble getting in character with Rick Baker. Photograph courtesy NBC Universal.

The final result. Photograph courtesy NBC Universal.

Creature feature The Wolfman had its share of troubles. Originally slated for a February 2009 release, it was pushed to November 2009, and was finally released—after a series of reshoots that skyrocketed the budget to $150 million—on February 12, 2010, opposite Valentine’s Day. (No surprise, V-Day nearly doubled The Wolfman’s opening take.) Now The Wolfman has returned from the dead, as monsters tend to, revealing itself as a passion project and a showcase for masterful makeup artist Rick Baker, whose work on the film has resulted in his 12th Oscar nomination. (He’s won six times.)

“The original The Wolf Man is one of the reasons I became a makeup artist,” says Baker, who has created iconic werewolves ranging from An American Werewolf in Paris to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as well as other lovable creatures—some very hairy (Harry and the Hendersons), some less hairy (The Nutty Professor), and some not hairy at all (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for his daughter’s Halloween costume.)

“I grew up in Southern California during the big 60s monster craze. At the time, every major town had a horror-movie fest. We went often,” Baker recalls. One day, he was reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and stumbled upon a profile of makeup artist Jack Pierce (Frankenstein, The Wolf Man). “I thought, Hey, this is some guy’s job. I could do that
We didn’t have much money, so I mowed a lot of lawns and saved my allowance for months to buy supplies. I learned makeup on my own face.” Soon, he was shooting short films in his bedroom, and baking prosthetics in his mother’s oven. “Our Thanksgiving turkey tasted like foam rubber,” he says. Baker scored his first job as the assistant to the makeup artist on The Exorcist and his career took off from there.

So when Baker heard the actor Benicio Del Toro was remaking the horror classic, he was all too eager to lend a hand. “The toughest thing was getting everyone on the same page about what the Wolfman would look like. I didn’t want to change the elements that made the classic Wolf Man, and [Benicio Del Toro] was happy to look exactly like the Jack Pierce Wolf Man (1941), but it needed an update.” In the design phase, Baker hit an obstacle when Del Toro came in to cast his face. He was sporting a three-inch-long beard. “That was a problem. He was doing the Che movie, so he couldn’t shave. I couldn’t really mold his face.” Working off old casts, Baker formed a passable model and, relying on his childhood method, also tested the makeup on himself and shot videos of it. “I wanted to see how it moved.”

For the final look, Baker used an “old-school technique,” whereby he lay loose hair (mostly yak!) by hand. In an era with many alternatives, this painstaking process is a lost art, but Baker says, “For me, it’s never about the easy way; it’s about the cooler way.” He predicted it would allow the actor more range of motion, which he felt was particularly important to the lupine lead. “Benicio can open his mouth twice as wide as anybody already.”

Baker says the application process took three to four hours—longer if Del Toro brought in old monster magazines from eBay. (Like Baker, The Wolfman was one of Del Toro’s early inspirations; he brought the idea for a remake to Universal and was a producer on the film.) “Eventually Benicio would nod off, and wake up hairy.”

Then Baker would spend all day on the set, reapplying hair and makeup between takes. “I really never finish the makeup. There’s never enough time. And there’s always things you would do differently,” he says. For this particular film, he had the chance to revisit the design for reshoots. While he admits that nailing continuity 10 months later was a challenge, he’s pleased with the results, which he hopes adds his own style to that of Pierce, with shades of Clay Campbell (The Werewolf, 1956) and Roy Ashton (The Curse of the Werewolf, 1961). After all, Baker says of The Wolfman, “it’s a love letter. These movies made me the weird man I am today.”